Comfort and Convenience

I go to the first of many goodbye parties and think back on my stay here.
Wednesday the bar of Orionis is always open and of course I was there. I've only missed it once or twice, so it's not surprising that I also spent this Wednesday evening there. In these past days I've come to realize how comfortable I feel in all these places. Only two months ago I knew nobody and was never sure who I would talk with this evening. Now I know who I can expect to see and I there is always someone I know and can share a drink with. It has happened fast, but so gradually that I have barely noticed a change.
These days I say a lot of goodbye's. I probably won't see the people who are not coming next Wednesday anytime soon. It's a pleasant time of looking back at how much I have experienced and how much I've grown to like life in Amsterdam. I'm not sad about leaving, because I have a lot to return to back home. But Amsterdam is nice. Most of all I think Amsterdam is a very comfortable and convenient city. So many things are easy here. When you want to travel even a cheap bike can take you anywhere within an hour, or you can go by bus, tram or metro at low prices. Everyone I talk to has less than an hour of travel time, no matter where they live it seems, and most have around twenty minutes to the center.
The food is also very convenient. It has not yet ceased to amaze me how you can buy any meal and not need a knife to cook it. Everything comes directly out of the package and onto the pan, into the oven/microwave or perhaps onto your plate. You don't need to chop or wash vegetables, that has been done for you. You don't need to cut the meat or wrap it in bacon, it's all been done and it's right there in the store. Now this wouldn't be amazing if you had to pay a lot for to get these services, but you really don't. You can get a great meal for four euro that you just have to heat yourself or you can buy the ingredients yourself and save around 20%, but you will probably also have to use it for more than one day then. The idea of convenience is that you are extremely flexible, when you buy exactly one meal that you can cook in no time at all. You spend as much time choosing your favorite dish as cooking it and the next day there are no leftovers, so you are free to change your dinner plans anytime. By now you must be thinking, that can't be right. No supermarket can beat a good homemade dinner with a prepared meal. I think you are right in that belief, but the Amsterdam people will just go to a restaurant when they want something better. Most of my colleagues eat out at least once every week and I even heard that one of them never cooks.
But even if it seems easy, I don't think it's really for me. It makes you feel a little too complacent, to not cook your own food. What were you doing with that precious half hour you saved? Was it really that much better spent in front of the TV? Right now I'm baking a rye bread and waiting for a chocolate mousse to cool down in the fridge. Cooking good food on a Friday is not a chore, but a good way to spend your time, that comes with a tasty reward at the end. Of course I'm not the only one who thinks that. The great kitchen I am sitting in is a testimony to exactly that. I know Hanneke and Ad both love to cook, so my efforts are also in preparation for their arrival. I have a nice dinner planned for them tomorrow when they return from vacation. I also prepared a gift of a restaurant visit for them, which I hope they will appreciate.
Well, enough about food, let's talk about drinks instead. I had those Thursday at my first real goodbye party. I met up with some of my friends from the monster group (first month introductory group) and had drinks at a bar in my neighborhood. We had a good time and I tasted the sweetest drink I have ever had. The difference from it to syrup was in my opinion only the alcohol percentage. But I liked it nonetheless - who doesn't like sweets? Nobody in Amsterdam it seems (yes, another sidetrack about food). It is surprising how sweet lunch is, with peanut butter and Nutella being some of the big reasons. Combine it with chocolate sprinkles on white bread and you have something that grown men eat for lunch, but which resembles a snickers more than a toast. It's odd to me, how so much of the food is sweet and it seems you can only balance your diet through eating low quantities overall. I have a big salad every day instead and I feel like that is a great lunch. As mentioned before everything comes straight out of the package, so you can just mix anything you want at the table be it different salads, vegetables, cheese, dressings or nuts. It's really good and it's one of the routines I have here, that I love. One of the things that have become a comfortable part of every day.
I'm also generally comfortable at work now. I've sort of figured out how to act there and although I'm sad that ambition is not an appreciated quality there I enjoy that I am so free. I can basically do whatever I want, so I have spent these past few days developing a word clustering algorithm. It's pretty basic, and has big problems with 'chaining', due to using the simple single-linkage clustering technique, but it's a lot of fun to develop. If I manage to create an efficient version using complete linkage, then it might even become very useful tool. But that's just speculation and it really doesn't matter if I make it or not, because nobody knows I'm doing it. It's a comfortable and easy life here, and soon I'll be moving into a hotel, so I don't imagine it will become any harder from then on. I'll also be saying many more goodbyes and hopefully serving some good rye bread.